In 1997, Robert Pasin, grandson of Radio Flyer founder Antonio Pasin, became the company’s CEO. He implemented changes to production while focusing Radio Flyer’s internal efforts on product development. The company took the issue of constructing itself a great spot to work very seriously and has been recognized many times by the media.
These were the two P policies – Pragmatic Innovation and People First – that I desired to reflect on when we invited about 50 members of the Tugboat Institute for an exemplary visit to Radio Flyer. First, I used to be struck by something that Radio Flyer didn’t have – a product selector.
In Silicon Valley, product collectors – people with an uncanny ability to discover recent products that were in mass demand – were shrouded in mystery. The best example was Steve Jobs. Another one was the creator of PalmPilot and Handspring, Jeff Hawkins, with whom I worked at Good Technology. This is a rare thing because it is quite difficult to find out over and yet again what customers will want, regardless of what. I experienced this while playing board games when I sat on the Cranium board at TPG.
#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; false; clear: left; font: 14px Helvetica, Arial, sans serif; width: px;} /* Add your individual Mailchimp form style overrides in your site’s stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of the HTML file. */
(function($) { window.fnames = recent array(); window.ftypes = recent array(); fnames[0]=’EMAIL’;ftypes[0]=’e-mail’;fnames[1]=’FNAME’;ftypes[1]=’text’;fnames[2]=’LNAME’;ftypes[2]=’text’;fnames[3]=’ADDRESS’;types f[3]=’address’;fnames[4]=’PHONE’;types f[4]=’phone’;fnames[5]=’MMERGE5′;f-types[5]=’text’;}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConfused(true);
Radio Flyer’s chief innovation officer, Tom Schlegel, explained the company’s product selection process. He showed us a slide with pictures of products – wagons, three-wheelers, foldable things, and so on – and a line separating them from the middle. He asked us to elucidate how people on one side differ from those on the other.
We couldn’t do it. Individual products definitely differed, but as groups each batches looked the same. That’s what Schlegel explained. He pointed to the game on the left side of the line. “All the ones on this side have been huge successes, our best sellers.” Then he pointed to the other side. “The ones on the right are a complete failure.”
Radio Flyer replaced the product selector with a system that jogged my memory of the innovation process I learned about at the SAS Institute – digging numerous little holes. Robert’s metaphor was seeds. “We have to plant a lot of seeds because we don’t know which ones will take root and grow to become a successful product.” The company would offer low-cost prototypes of recent products to customers, retailers and distributors to acquire market feedback before increasing production and investing in inventory.
Robert admitted that the system is fallible. Sometimes an early market test suggested a winner that later turned out to be a flop. Other times, apparent duds were eliminated, but perhaps they may have beaten the market test. They would never know. Robert stated that “every time we have had such a strong opinion about a product that we chose to ignore early warning signs in the market, we have almost always been disappointed. These failures reminded us how important it is to have a repeatable process that is not dependent on any human.”
Radio Flyer’s Chief People Officer, Amy Bastuga, explained how the company developed practices that made it a “best place to work.” She implemented dozens of techniques used by the company to develop a team mentality among employees. It jogged my memory of something Will Hearst (now president of Hearst Corporation) told me years earlier, that the competitive advantage that people underestimate is the accumulation of hundreds of little things that a company has learned to do well, things that cannot be replicated in a startup that did not even have the time to build the system.
It struck me that I had seen exactly what Will was talking about during tons of of People First practices on Radio Flyer. They included the smallest details. How were recent employees greeted when they showed up on their first day at work? What was sitting on their desks? What happened in the first week? How were they assessed? Robert took out several very large cork boards covered with documents describing every aspect of the worker experience that Radio Flyer practices. He gave our members copies to make use of as they saw fit. “Just remove the Radio Flyer logo,” he said, “but feel free to plagiarize them as much as you want.”
During the time we spent with Robert, I could not help but notice the deep bond he felt with his grandfather Antonio, who took all the risks of building the company in the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties. One of the largest was the exhibition he created for the 1933 Centennial World’s Fair in Chicago. With the help of a friend, he constructed a 45-foot-tall “roller coaster boy” pulling a giant Radio Flyer wagon. It was so expensive that if it didn’t bring in a significant number of recent business, the company would probably go out of business. Fortunately, it was one of the fair’s hottest exhibits, where visitors could purchase miniature radio leaflets for 25 cents.
Apparently, Antonio Pasin was not only a craftsman, but also a born salesman. His grandson too. I saw that he considered Radio Flyer a trust fund of which he was now the trustee. It is as if, in addition to property, he had an obligation to uphold the honor of something that is a part of his family’s heritage and his own identity.
More Ps: Private. Intention. Persistence.
Another way: building firms that last… and last… and last
The post Radio Flyer: A Case Study in Pragmatic Innovation and first appeared first on StartupNation.